The Voice before the Void: Arcana, Story, Poetry

An astonishingly creepy story by one of the most popular of U.S. Presidents.

Any contemporary listener has a ready name for the “goblin” of this story.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“A Goblin Story”

from The Wilderness Hunter

Theodore Roosevelt

Frontiersmen are not, as a rule, apt to be very superstitious. They lead lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in things spiritual and supernatural. I have heard but few ghost stories while living on the frontier, and these few were of a perfectly commonplace and conventional type.

But I once listened to a goblin story which rather impressed me. It was told by a grisled, weather-beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman, who was born and had passed all his life on the frontier. He must have believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain points of the tale; but he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind; besides, he knew well the stories told by the Indian medicine men in their winter camps, of the snow-walkers, and the spectres, and the formless evil beings that haunt the forest depths, and dog and waylay the lonely wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no man can say.

When the event occurred Bauman was still a young man, and was trapping

with a partner among the mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon from

the head of Wisdom River. Not having had much luck, he and his partner

determined to go up into a particularly wild and lonely pass through

which ran a small stream said to contain many beaver. The pass had

an evil reputation because the year before a solitary hunter who

had wandered into it was there slain, seemingly by a wild beast, the

half-eaten remains being afterwards found by some mining prospectors who

had passed his camp only the night before.

The memory of this event, however, weighed very lightly with the two

trappers, who were as adventurous and hardy as others of their kind.

They took their two lean mountain ponies to the foot of the pass, where

they left them in an open beaver meadow, the rocky timber-clad ground

being from thence onwards impracticable for horses. They then struck out

on foot through the vast, gloomy forest, and in about four hours reached

a little open glade where they concluded to camp, as signs of game were

plenty.

There was still an hour or two of daylight left, and after building a

brush lean-to and throwing down and opening their packs, they started up

stream. The country was very dense and hard to travel through, as there

was much down timber, although here and there the sombre woodland was

broken by small glades of mountain grass.

At dusk they again reached camp. The glade in which it was pitched was

not many yards wide, the tall, close-set pines and firs rising round

it like a wall. On one side was a little stream, beyond which rose the

steep mountain-slopes, covered with the unbroken growth of the evergreen

forest.

They were surprised to find that during their short absence something,

apparently a bear, had visited camp, and had rummaged about among their

things, scattering the contents of their packs, and in sheer wantonness

destroying their lean-to. The footprints of the beast were quite plain,

but at first they paid no particular heed to them,

An eerie scene of extraordinary courage and honor and self-sacrifice.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Death of Two Cheyenne Braves”

from The Wilderness Hunter

Theodore Roosevelt

The incident, related by Lieutenant Pitcher, took place in 1890, near Tongue River, in northern Wyoming. The command with which he was serving was camped near the Cheyenne Reservation. One day two young Cheyenne bucks, met one of the government herders, and promptly killed him–in a sudden fit, half of ungovernable blood lust, half of mere ferocious lightheartedness. They then dragged his body into the brush and left it. The disappearance of the herder of course attracted attention, and a search was organized by the cavalry. At first the Indians stoutly denied all knowledge of the missing man; but when it became evident that the search party would shortly find him, two or three of the chiefs joined them, and piloted them to where the body lay; and acknowledged that he had been murdered by two of their band, though at first they refused to give their names. The commander of the post demanded that the murderers be given up. The chiefs said that they were very sorry, that this could not be done, but that they were willing to pay over any reasonable number of ponies to make amends for the death. This offer was of course promptly refused, and the commander notified them that if they did not surrender the murderers by a certain time he would hold the whole tribe responsible and would promptly move out and attack them. Upon this the chiefs, after holding full counsel with the tribe, told the commander that they had no power to surrender the murderers, but that the latter had said that sooner than see their tribe involved in a hopeless struggle they would of their own accord come in and meet the troops anywhere the latter chose to appoint, and die fighting. To this the commander responded: “All right; let them come into the agency in half an hour.” The chiefs acquiesced, and withdrew.

Immediately the Indians sent mounted messengers at speed from camp to camp, summoning all their people to witness the act of fierce self-doom; and soon the entire tribe of Cheyennes, many of them having their faces blackened in token of mourning, moved down and took up a position on the hill-side close to the agency. At the appointed hour both young men appeared in their handsome war dress, galloped to the top of the hill near the encampment, and deliberately opened fire on the troops. The latter merely fired a few shots to keep the young desperadoes off, while Lieutenant Pitcher and a score of cavalrymen left camp to make a circle and drive them in; they did not wish to hurt them, but to capture and give them over to the Indians, so that the latter might be forced themselves to inflict the punishment. However, they were unable to accomplish their purpose; one of the young braves went straight at them, firing his rifle and wounding the horse of one of the cavalrymen, so that, simply in self-defence, the latter had to fire a volley, which laid low the assailant; the other, his horse having been shot, was killed in the brush, fighting to the last. All the while, from the moment the two doomed braves appeared until they fell, the Cheyennes on the hill-side had been steadily singing the death chant. When the young men had both died, and had thus averted the fate which their misdeeds would else have brought upon the tribe, the warriors took their bodies and bore them away for burial honors, the soldiers looking on in silence. Where the slain men were buried the whites never knew, but all that night they listened to the dismal wailing of the dirges with which the tribesmen celebrated their gloomy funeral rites.

Regrettable and complex, Roosevelt’s attitude toward Native Americans is reflective of his entire nation’s attitude toward Native Americans.

Here, Roosevelt goads his reluctant friend into relating one of the most desperate struggles of his friend’s life, because the event also happened to be one of the most famous gunfights of the American West.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Trapped by a War Party”

from The Wilderness Hunter

Theodore Roosevelt

Accidents are common. Men break their collar-bones, arms, or legs by falling when riding at speed over dangerous ground, when cutting cattle or trying to control a stampeded herd, or by being thrown or rolled on by bucking or rearing horses; or their horses, and on rare occasion even they themselves, are gored by fighting steers. Death by storm or in flood, death in striving to master a wild and vicious horse, or in handling maddened cattle, and too often death in brutal conflict with one of his own fellows–any one of these is the not unnatural end of the life of the dweller on the plains or in the mountains.

But a few years ago other risks had to be run from savage beasts, and from the Indians. Since I have been ranching on the Little Missouri, two men have been killed by bears in the neighborhood of my range; and in the early years of my residence there, several men living or travelling in the country were slain by small war-parties of young braves. All the old-time trappers and hunters could tell stirring tales of their encounters with Indians.

My friend, Tazewell Woody, was among the chief actors in one of the most

noteworthy adventures of this kind. He was a very quiet man, and it

was exceedingly difficult to get him to talk over any of his past

experiences; but one day, when he was in high good-humor with me for

having made three consecutive straight shots at elk, he became quite

communicative, and I was able to get him to tell me one story which

I had long wished to hear from his lips, having already heard of it

through one of the other survivors of the incident. When he found that I

already knew a good deal old Woody told me the rest.

It was in the spring of 1875, and Woody and two friends were trapping on

the Yellowstone. The Sioux were very bad at the time and had killed

many prospectors, hunters, cowboys, and settlers; the whites retaliated

whenever they got a chance, but, as always in Indian warfare, the

sly, lurking, bloodthirsty savages inflicted much more loss than they

suffered.

The three men, having a dozen horses with them, were camped by the

river-side in a triangular patch of brush, shaped a good deal like a

common flat-iron. On reaching camp they started to put out their traps;

and when he came back in the evening Woody informed his companions that

he had seen a great deal of Indian sign, and that he believed there were

Sioux in the neighborhood. His companions both laughed at him, assuring

him that they were not Sioux at all but friendly Crows, and that

they would be in camp next morning; “and sure enough,” said Woody,

meditatively, “they _were_ in camp next morning.” By dawn one of the men

went down the river to look at some of the traps, while Woody started

out to where the horses were, the third man remaining in camp to get

breakfast. Suddenly two shots were heard down the river, and in another

moment a mounted Indian swept towards the horses. Woody fired, but

missed him, and he drove off five while Woody, running forward,

succeeded in herding the other seven into camp. Hardly had this been

accomplished before the man who had gone down the river appeared, out of

breath with his desperate run, having been surprised by several Indians,

“How Cowboys Die in North Dakota”

from The Wilderness Hunter

Theodore Roosevelt

Last spring one of the Three-Seven riders, a magnificent horseman, was killed on the round-up near Belfield, his horse bucking and falling on him. “It was accounted a plumb gentle horse too,” said my informant, “only it sometimes sulked and acted a little mean when it was cinched up behind.” The unfortunate rider did not know of this failing of the “plumb gentle horse,” and as soon as he was in the saddle it threw itself over sideways with a great bound, and he fell on his head, and never spoke again.

Such accidents are too common in the wild country to attract very much attention; the men accept them with grim quiet, as inevitable in such lives as theirs–lives that are harsh and narrow in their toil and their pleasure alike, and that are ever-bounded by an iron horizon of hazard and hardship. During the last year and a half three other men from the ranches in my immediate neighborhood have met their deaths in the course of their work. One, a trail boss of the O X, was drowned while swimming his herd across a swollen river. Another, one of the fancy ropers of the W Bar, was killed while roping cattle in a corral; his saddle turned, the rope twisted round him, he was pulled off, and trampled to death by his own horse.

The fourth man, a cowpuncher named Hamilton, lost his life during the last week of October, 1891, in the first heavy snowstorm of the season. Yet he was a skilled plainsman, on ground he knew well, and just before straying himself, he successfully instructed two men who did not know the country how to get to camp. They were all three with the round-up, and were making a circle through the Bad Lands; the wagons had camped on the eastern edge of these Bad Lands, where they merged into the prairie, at the head of an old disused road, which led about due east from the Little Missouri. It was a gray, lowering day, and as darkness came on Hamilton’s horse played out, and he told his two companions not to wait, as it had begun to snow, but to keep on towards the north, skirting some particularly rough buttes, and as soon as they struck the road to turn to the right and follow it out to the prairie, where they would find camp; he particularly warned them to keep a sharp look-out, so as not to pass over the dim trail unawares in the dusk and the storm. They followed his advice, and reached camp safely; and after they had left him nobody ever again saw him alive. Evidently he himself, plodding northwards, passed over the road without seeing it in the gathering gloom; probably he struck it at some point where the ground was bad, and the dim trail in consequence disappeared entirely, as is the way with these prairie roads–making them landmarks to be used with caution. He must then have walked on and on, over rugged hills and across deep ravines, until his horse came to a standstill; he took off its saddle and picketed it to a dwarfed ash. Its frozen carcass was found with the saddle near by, two months later. He now evidently recognized some landmark, and realized that he had passed the road, and was far to the north of the round-up wagons; but he was a resolute, self-confident man, and he determined to strike out for a line camp, which he knew lay about due east of him, two or three miles out on the prairie, on one of the head branches of Knife River. Night must have fallen by this time, and he missed the camp, probably passing it within less than a mile; but he did pass it, and with it all hopes of life, and walked wearily on to his doom, through the thick darkness and the driving snow. At last his strength failed, and he lay down in the tall grass of a little hollow. Five months later, in the early spring, the riders from the line camp found his body, resting, face downwards, with the forehead on the folded arms.

Insight into cowboy culture.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Light-hearted Way of Regarding ‘Broke Horses'”

from The Wilderness Hunter

Theodore Roosevelt

In the cow-country there is nothing more refreshing than the light-hearted belief entertained by the average man to the effect that any animal which by main force has been saddled and ridden, or harnessed and driven a couple of times, is a “broke horse.” My present foreman is firmly wedded to this idea, as well as to its complement, the belief that any animal with hoofs, before any vehicle with wheels, can be driven across any country. One summer on reaching the ranch I was entertained with the usual accounts of the adventures and misadventures which had befallen my own men and my neighbors since I had been out last. In the course of the conversation my foreman remarked: “We had a great time out here about six weeks ago. There was a professor from Ann Arbor come out with his wife to see the Bad Lands, and they asked if we could rig them up a team, and we said we guessed we could, and Foley’s boy and I did; but it ran away with him and broke his leg! He was here for a month. I guess he didn’t mind it though.” Of this I was less certain, forlorn little Medora being a “busted” cow-town, concerning which I once heard another of my men remark, in reply to an inquisitive commercial traveller: “How many people lives here? Eleven–counting the chickens–when they’re all in town!”

My foreman continued: “By George, there was something that professor said afterwards that made me feel hot. I sent word up to him by Foley’s boy that seein’ as how it had come out we wouldn’t charge him nothin’ for the rig; and that professor he answered that he was glad we were showing him some sign of consideration, for he’d begun to believe he’d fallen into a den of sharks, and that we gave him a runaway team a purpose. That made me hot, calling that a runaway team. Why, there was one of them horses never _could_ have run away before; it hadn’t never been druv but twice! And the other horse maybe had run away a few times, but there was lots of times he _hadn’t_ run away. I esteemed that team full as liable not to run away as it was to run away,” concluded my foreman, evidently deeming this as good a warranty of gentleness as the most exacting could require.

Theodore Roosevelt recounts the story of one of his friends telling him the story of one of his scars.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“The Ending of a Desperado”

from The Wilderness Hunter

Theodore Roosevelt

One of my valued friends in the mountains, and one of the best hunters with whom I ever travelled, was a man who had a peculiarly light-hearted way of looking at conventional social obligations. Though in some ways a true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of much shrewdness and of great courage and resolution. Moreover, he possessed what only a few men do possess, the capacity to tell the truth. He saw facts as they were, and could tell them as they were, and he never told an untruth unless for very weighty reasons. He was pre-eminently a philosopher, of a happy, sceptical turn of mind. He had no prejudices. He never looked down, as so many hard characters do, upon a person possessing a different code of ethics. His attitude was one of broad, genial tolerance. He saw nothing out of the way in the fact that he had himself been a road-agent, a professional gambler, and a desperado at different stages of his career. On the other hand, he did not in the least hold it against any one that he had always acted within the law. At the time that I knew him he had become a man of some substance, and naturally a staunch upholder of the existing order of things. But while he never boasted of his past deeds, he never apologized for them, and evidently would have been quite as incapable of understanding that they needed an apology as he would have been incapable of being guilty of mere vulgar boastfulness. He did not often allude to his past career at all. When he did, he recited its incidents perfectly naturally and simply, as events, without any reference to or regard for their ethical significance. It was this quality which made him at times a specially pleasant companion, and always an agreeable narrator. The point of his story, or what seemed to him the point, was rarely that which struck me. It was the incidental sidelights the story threw upon his own nature and the somewhat lurid surroundings amid which he had moved.

On one occasion when we were out together we killed a bear, and after

skinning it, took a bath in a lake. I noticed he had a scar on the side

of his foot and asked him how he got it, to which he responded with

indifference:

“Oh, that? Why, a man shootin’ at me to make me dance, that was all.”

I expressed some curiosity in that matter, and he went on:

“Well, the way of it was this: It was when I was keeping a saloon in New

Mexico, and there was a man there by the name of Fowler, and there was a

reward on him of three thousand dollars—-”

“Put on him by the State?”

“No, put on by his wife,” said my friend; “and there was this–”

“Hold on,” I interrupted; “put on by his wife did you say?”

“Yes, by his wife. Him an her had been keepin’ a faro bank, you see, and

they quarreled about it, so she just put a reward on him, and so–”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but do you mean to say that this reward was put

on publicly?” to which my friend answered, with an air of gentlemanly

boredom at being interrupted to gratify my thirst for irrelevant detail:

“Oh, no, not publicly. She just mentioned it to six or eight intimate

personal friends.”

“Go on,” I responded, somewhat overcome by this instance of the

primitive simplicity with which New Mexico matrimonial disputes were

managed, and he continued:

“Well, two men come ridin’ in to see me to borrow my guns. My guns was

Colt’s self-cockers. It was a new thing then, an they was the only ones

in town. These come to me,

Disaster overwhelms a frontier town.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Buildings Made of Canvas”

from The Wilderness Hunter

Theodore Roosevelt

Squalid, pretentiously named little clusters of make-shift dwellings on the edge of the wild country spring up with the rapid growth of mushrooms, and are often no longer lived. In their earlier stages these towns are frequently built entirely of canvas, and are subject to grotesque calamities. When the territory purchased from the Sioux, in the Dakotas, a couple of years ago was thrown open to settlement, there was a furious inrush of men on horseback and in wagons, and various ambitious cities sprang up overnight. The new settlers were all under the influence of that curious craze which causes every true westerner to put unlimited faith in the unknown and untried; many had left all they had in a far better farming country, because they were true to their immemorial belief that, wherever they were, their luck would be better if they went somewhere else. They were always on the move, and headed for the vague beyond. As miners see visions of all the famous mines of history in each new camp, so these would-be city founders saw future St. Pauls and Omahas in every forlorn group of tents pitched by some muddy stream in a desert of gumbo and sage-brush; and they named both the towns and the canvas buildings in accordance with their bright hopes for the morrow, rather than with reference to the mean facts of the day. One of these towns, which when twenty-four hours old boasted of six saloons, a “court-house,” and an “opera house,” was overwhelmed by early disaster. The third day of its life a whirlwind came along and took off the opera house and half the saloons; and the following evening lawless men nearly finished the work of the elements. The riders of a huge trail-outfit from Texas, to their glad surprise discovered the town and abandoned themselves to a night of roaring and lethal carousal. Next morning the city authorities were lamenting, with oaths of bitter rage, that “them hell-and-twenty Flying A cowpunchers had cut the court-house up into parts.” It was true. The cowboys were in need of chaps, and with an admirable mixture of adventurousness, frugality, and ready adaptability to circumstances, had made substitutes therefore in the shape of canvas overalls, cut from the roof and walls of the shaky temple of justice.

An ethical dilemma on the wild frontier.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Hunting a Horse-thief”

from The Wilderness Hunter

Theodore Roosevelt

Early one spring, now nearly ten years ago, I was out hunting some lost horses. They had strayed from the range three months before, and we had in a roundabout way heard that they were ranging near some broken country, where a man named Brophy had a ranch, nearly fifty miles from my own. When I started thither the weather was warm, but the second day out it grew colder and a heavy snowstorm came on. Fortunately I was able to reach the ranch all right, finding there one of the sons of a Little Beaver ranchman, and a young cowpuncher belonging to a Texas outfit, whom I knew very well. After putting my horse into the corral and throwing him down some hay I strode into the low hut, made partly of turf and partly of cottonwood logs, and speedily warmed myself before the fire. We had a good warm supper, of bread, potatoes, fried venison, and tea. My two companions grew very sociable and began to talk freely over their pipes. There were two bunks one above the other. I climbed into the upper, leaving my friends, who occupied the lower, sitting together on a bench recounting different incidents in the careers of themselves and their cronies during the winter that had just passed. Soon one of them asked the other what had become of a certain horse, a noted cutting pony, which I had myself noticed the preceding fall. The question aroused the other to the memory of a wrong which still rankled, and he began (I alter one or two of the proper names):

“Why, that was the pony that got stole. I had been workin’ him on rough

ground when I was out with the Three Bar outfit and he went tender

forward, so I turned him loose by the Lazy B ranch, and when I came back

to git him there wasn’t anybody at the ranch and I couldn’t find him.

The sheep-man who lives about two miles west, under Red Clay butte,

told me he seen a fellow in a wolfskin coat, ridin’ a pinto bronco, with

white eyes, leadin’ that pony of mine just two days before; and I hunted

round till I hit his trail and then I followed to where I’d reckoned he

was headin’ for–the Short Pine Hills. When I got there a rancher told

me he had seen the man pass on towards Cedartown, and sure enough when

I struck Cedartown I found he lived there in a ‘dobe house, just outside

the town. There was a boom on the town and it looked pretty slick.

There was two hotels and I went into the first, and I says, ‘Where’s the

justice of the peace?’ says I to the bartender.

“‘There ain’t no justice of the peace,’ says he, ‘the justice of the

peace got shot.’

“‘Well, where’s the constable?’ says I.

“‘Why, it was him that shot the justice of the peace!’ says he; ‘he’s

skipped the country with a bunch of horses.’

“‘Well, ain’t there no officer of the law left in this town?’ says I.

“‘Why, of course,’ says he, ‘there’s a probate judge; he is over

tendin’ bar at the Last Chance Hotel.’

“So I went over to the Last Chance Hotel and I walked in there.

‘Mornin’,’ says I.

“‘Morning’,’ says he.

“‘You be the probate judge?’ says I.

“‘That’s what I am,’ says he. ‘What do you want?’ says he.

“‘I want justice,’ says I.

“‘What kind of justice do you want?’ says he. ‘What’s it for?’

“‘It’s for stealin’ a horse,’ says I.

Armistice Day Special:

Until war is abolished.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Armistice Day”

Roselle Mercier Montgomery

I think I hear them stirring there, today,

Who have lain still

So long, so long, beside the Aisne and Loire,

On Verdun hill.

I think I hear them whispering, today,

The young, the brave,

The gallant and the gay–unmurmuring long,

There in the grave.

I think I hear them sighing there, today–

They sigh for all

The glory and the wonder that was life–

Beyond recall!

I think that their young eyes are wistfully

On us who go

So gayly to our sports, this holiday…

I think they know!

I think that they are listening today…

I feel them near!

Our orators declaim–they answer back,

“Why lie we here?”

Across the fleet, forgetting years it comes,

Today–their cry,

“O World, O World, if it was all in vain,

Why did we die?”

Above the earth’s enduring hates, they ask,

“Was it–for this?”

I think they are remembering, this day

Of Armistice!

And oh, I think I hear them weeping there

Who should be sleeping…

A plaintive thing–to hear across the world

The young dead weeping!

Armistice Day Special:

In commemoration of World War I

“Joy”

The Voice before the Void

Millions died in mud

Joy exists only as a shadow’s shadow

For death is the model and senses but fracture

Yet within ten centimeters lies buried pleasure

Fabled transcendenture

The television droning in sunless morning

Unsurpassed boring

Holes in a head’s membrance

Ten centimeters

Give no more

Deny no fewer

Heft of lead soldiers in hand

Reigning dark heart monarch

Draw ten centimeters nearer

For how we strive to die

For how blood is warm on the hands

Millions die in mud

What lies nigh?

No joy

And we will live and we will die

Draw to within ten centimeters

There can be no joy

Where there is memory

Millions will die in mud